Putin’s ‘Rabble of Thin-Necked Henchmen’

Not even the most passionate supporters of Vladimir Putin are pretending that the results of this weekend’s election are in doubt: Putin, Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, is about to embark on his sixth term. And so, with no electoral politics to debate, both pro-Putin and liberal Kremlinologists in the Russian-language mediasphere have been focusing instead on changes at the very top of Russia’s power pyramid: the new elite that is coming to replace the old Putin cronies, the tensions between the men in military uniforms and those in suits, and the perennial question of who will lead the country in the case of Putin’s sudden death.

Before the war, perhaps the leading candidate for a successor was Putin’s favorite general and then–deputy head of military intelligence, Aleksey Dyumin, who commanded the Special Operations Forces’ top-secret “little green men” during the annexation of Crimea. But his train has departed, as Russians say: “Dyumin’s name was connected to Wagner, which decreased his chance to become Putin’s successor,” a columnist named Andrey Revnivtsev wrote on Tsargrad, a website popular among military and secret agencies, on Monday. Now, according to Revnivtsev, the favored military candidate is a different general, Andrey Mordvichev, who commanded Russian forces in horrific battles in the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Avidiivka.

That military sources envision a general at the top, and that they disagree on which one, is not surprising. ”The so-called siloviki from the security elite do not stop eating each other alive only because the war goes on,” Ilya Barabanov, an observer of the Russian military and security cadres, told me.

Liberal Kremlinologists, however, have been more focused on civilian possibilities. The prime minister is, after all, the president’s legal successor under Russia’s constitution. Putin’s current prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, reportedly has a good public reputation and a competent staff—conditions that could bode ill for him under a jealous president.

“If Putin is not paranoid, he would seem definitely paranoid to get rid of the current, solid prime minister, Mishustin, too, only because he is too strong,” Nina Khruscheva, a historian of Russian authoritarianism and propaganda at the New School, told me. And yet, many speculate that Putin will do exactly that. Some point to Putin’s 41-year-old adviser, Maksim Oreshkin, an economist and a banker, as a possible replacement. According to Alexandra Prokopenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, both Oreshkin and Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, once a liberal and now a strong supporter of the war, are angling for the premiership.  

[Read: What’s happening in Russia is not an election]

For many analysts, this moment comes with a whiff of déjà vu. “On the eve of Stalin’s funeral, nobody could foresee the end of the regime, the trial and executions of Stalin’s most brutal police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and other KGB members. I would compare the situation today to the bullfight under the carpet in 1952, months before Stalin’s death,” Boris Vishnevsky, an opposition member of the city council in St. Petersburg, told me. “Right now we cannot see who will lead us to changes; we see only all those sworn to stay loyal to Putin. That was the case in 1952 too. But as soon as Stalin fell ill, there were less sinful ones who arrested his most brutal executors."

The fight over who would succeed Stalin occurred after World War II. Putin’s war, however, is still going on, and the Russian president is clearly concerned about maintaining military and political discipline around it. Public attitudes toward Ukraine are in a tangle. Denis Volkov, the director of Russia’s independent polling organization, the Levada Center, told me that more than 70 percent of Russians want a cease-fire, and two-thirds say that the war is simply too costly. And yet, the same polls show that a majority of Russians believe that starting the war was justified and that Russia will ultimately win.

In a recent address to Parliament, Putin commended veterans of the war in Ukraine as the best candidates for a new elite. “People like them will not back down, fail, or be unfaithful,” Putin said. But although personal loyalty and proof of patriotism carry a particular currency for Putin, even military men can be found wanting: Last year’s coup attempt by the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ensnared at least four generals, whom Putin has mostly sent into exile to take over Wagner’s business in Syria. And last April, well before the aborted Wagner coup, Putin dismissed three generals as well as his deputy defense minister, Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, after paying a brief visit to the front. The former commander of Russia’s air force, General Sergei Surovikin, whose nickname is Armageddon, was reportedly arrested in June—at least, he vanished from public view and was removed as the head of the air force, though his daughter has claimed that “nothing has happened to him.”

Whether Putin’s successor will be a general or a politician, he will almost certainly not be chosen in an election or even in public view. Alexander Cherkasov, a Nobel Peace Prize–winning human-rights activist, told me that the Kremlin and the Security Council are “the main black boxes” of the Russian regime—the places where decisions are made, and within which no one can really say who might be willing to tell the truth. Russia’s future will likely be decided within those black boxes, Cherkasov intimated. Only one major new external factor emerged in recent years, the analyst Serguei Parkhomenko told me, and that was “the rapid rise of Prigozhin, who is dead now.”

[Read: How I lost the Russia that never was]

On Wednesday, just two days before the opening of Russia’s so-called election, Ukrainian drones struck crucial infrastructure in three Russian regions in the hours before dawn. Also during those early-morning hours, Federal Security Service (FSB) agents broke down the doors and searched the houses of dozens of artists in five Russian cities. According to one recent report, more citizens have been convicted on political charges under Putin than for “anti-Sovietism” under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Just last month, Putin’s foremost civilian rival, Alexei Navalny, turned up dead in the frigid Siberian prison camp to which he’d been consigned after surviving the Kremlin’s attempt to poison him.

None of this has made Russia more secure. Rather, the past week’s events have revealed major gaps in Russia’s defenses: Ukrainian tanks invaded the region of Kursk, drones hit two major oil refineries, and a plane crashed. In the past two years of war, Russia has failed to prevent Ukraine from breaching its borders, assaulting its railroads and oil companies, blowing up its bridge to Crimea, and even attacking the Kremlin itself.

[Read: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine]

“Look at the Russian Black Sea fleet. Ukraine has practically destroyed it, and the only response Putin had was his usual: dismiss the fleet commander and appoint someone new,” Olga Romanova, the founder of the humanitarian NGO Russia Behind Bars, told me. The FSB, she said, has merged the division specializing in persecuting dissidents with the one charged with investigating terrorism, to the disadvantage of the latter group.  

Vishnevsky, the city councilman, and his party, Yabloko, have been writing letters and raising money for political prisoners in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, where activists, artists, and ordinary people with anti-war views regularly awaken to the same blood-freezing knock on the door that Soviet dissidents spoke of in years past.

“All the current decision makers have sworn to be faithful to Putin,” Vishnevsky told me, but even they understand “that they cannot live this way any longer … Everybody, including me, believes that the changes will take place at the very top by what seems now Putin’s most faithful men. Everybody tries to guess who.”

He quoted his favorite poet, Osip Mandelstam, who wrote of Stalin and his inner circle:

Around him a rabble of thin-necked henchmen,
He plays with the services of these half-men.

Some whistle, some miaowing, some sniffling,
but he just bangs and pokes.